


A Hope and A Prayer

by daviesroyal



Series: The Slow Road to Redemption [1]
Category: Leverage
Genre: And Nephilim, And actual angels, And psuedo-Nephilim, Eliot has lived a very long life, Mentions of Angel, Mentions of Stargate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-14
Updated: 2017-07-14
Packaged: 2018-12-02 03:15:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11500629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daviesroyal/pseuds/daviesroyal
Summary: He has always been a soldier, but it's been a long time since he found a cause worth fighting for.





	A Hope and A Prayer

He has always been a soldier.

First for his family, fighting the cousins who wanted to tear the world apart just because they could, and who seemed like children even as he and his siblings spilled their ichor over and over and over—

Then, when he can’t bear to keep killing after the giants  _ (the First, not so different, so easily could have been them) _ were all dead, he sinks into mortal skin and walks among the humans; the monsters, too, and isn’t it a kick in the teeth to realise just how thin that line was? He pretends, wears different names and different faces through all the different times and places, and never once looks back to his family and what he had once been.

_ (That’s a lie, of course; he looks back all the time, but he never goes back and they leave him be because they respect their general and his sister’s the only one who’d ever really challenge him anyway, and she keeps tabs on everyone so if he ever needs them they’ll be there.) _

He plays at medicine, at art, at all the things he’s never allowed himself as a soldier. He finds unexpected joy in cooking, in creating something to nourish instead of destroying life, and that passion stays with all his incarnations. 

He tries his hand at law, once, and doesn’t realise until too late exactly what the Senior Partners are and they think they own his soul.

_ (Joke’s on them; even if he did have one, it had been sold to his family long ago, and he’s pretty sure they’ll beat the demonic law firm any day.) _

He gets out by faking his death  _ (again—he’s gotten very proficient at it; creative, too, although he can’t really take credit for someone else shooting him) _ and starts over in a small town in a small body. He can’t really get his childhood back  _ (like he ever had one in the first place), _ but he almost convinces himself he’s happy.

Then, for some inexplicable reason, he enlists in the United States military.

_ (Once a soldier, always a soldier.) _

He settles into fighting so easily that it scares him, especially because the people he’s going into battle with are nothing like his siblings. The whole damn war isn’t, really, and he doesn’t know why he’s surprised; humans have long since moved past archaic weapons when it comes to killing each other, but their bombs could almost rival his power when he really puts his mind to it. Still, the bonds between battle-brothers are the same, and while basic is annoying, he falls into some kind of rhythm.

The brass is a little startled at his efficiency, at the speed with which he moves up through the ranks, at the ease with which he leads his men and kills the enemy’s. He just shrugs and gives the  _ aw, shucks _ smile he’s practiced for millennia. That gets him a reassignment to Special Forces, and something uneasy shifts in his gut.

That feeling is entirely justified, because it turns out the US government has been fighting  _ aliens _ through the stupid fucking  _ Astra Porta _ , and he has no idea how his family missed this. He and his siblings had never liked the Alterans, but when they’d all died or left he’d thought that was the end of it. Now, he’s part of a  _ gate team _ that regularly goes through wormholes on retrieval missions, and it’s bizarrely like being back home.

He lasts three years. It’s a stupid mistake, getting too comfortable with his team and expecting them to be as resilient, as  _ good _ , as his family, but he stops watching for an instant, just one distraction, and the next thing he knows, they’re all dead, and the brass and government officials give him a fucking letter and empty platitudes and if he stays the wrong people will die.

_ (Once upon a time, he didn’t have to worry about that. What happened to his self-control?) _

He decides that’s the end of teams.

He leaves the States, stops working for the government and starts working whatever jobs seem like a good fit. He doesn’t have a uniform, and he refuses to pick up a gun if he doesn’t have to, but now that he’s started fighting again it’s addictive, pulling him closer to the fire.

_ (That would have been comforting, once, when his siblings were watching his back. They still keep their distance; he doesn’t really need them yet.) _

Months pass by, as blurred and listless as he is. Somehow, he realises, he’s built up a reputation. Eavesdropping on whispered conversations in seedy establishments reveals bits and pieces of a legend almost as incredible as his family’s. He can’t know how this will turn out, he’s not a precog, but he’ll use it to his advantage if he can.

It turns out he doesn’t have to put much effort into it. Damien Moreau finds him quickly enough, and it’s the closest thing to a steady job since he walked out on the US government.

A year later and he’s become numb to pretty much everything—especially the jobs Moreau gives him. He can’t get out,  _ won’t, _ because surely this is the only place for someone like him.

_ (He knows this is the exact opposite of true; his sister seems to have taken a leaf out of his book and gone mingling with the mortals, dragging most of their other siblings with her. He’s heard of an elite group, mostly dealing with supernatural threats but stepping in as enforcers for human conflicts if the reason’s good enough. Even so, he refuses to need them.) _

He ends up spiralling and killing and doing damnable  _ (ha!) _ things in Damien Moreau’s name, until finally he’s across the room from the target who happens to be one of his own fucking soldiers. His  _ brother. _ Another just like him, only the soldier  _ (son of Ezekiel, he thinks) _ has gone even more insane than him and  _ likes it. _

He has to put his brother down like a fucking mad dog, and Moreau just rolls his dead-cold eyes and asks if he’s going soft with a shrewd sharpness and he has to walk away  _ (again) _ before he kills people.

_ (They wouldn’t be the wrong ones this time, but he thinks he should probably stop killing humans now regardless.) _

He goes back to working alone, without even the barest support structure that Moreau had offered, and knows that he absolutely cannot go back to his siblings after killing one of their own, even if it was, in the loosest sense of the term, self-defence.

_ (Ezekiel’s son wouldn’t have stopped until someone was dead, so he had to make sure that someone was the crazed soldier.) _

He lets his hair grow out, though, one distinctive difference between the soldiers that he’s played and the warrior he once was, and hopes it’s enough of a reminder to keep him from the same darkness that swallowed Benhail. He tries to keep his head down, whispers of his passing only adding to the new legend, tries to take jobs that don’t hurt innocent people. He doesn’t let himself settle into a rhythm again, but he has a vague pattern to his days now.

He’s sitting in a no-name diner in a barely-there town in the States after finishing a job in Tehran. He’s scrolling through his phone contacts to find another gig and eating the adequate-at-best food, planning to get a room at the only motel before hitting the road.

A man slides into the chair across from him. “Eliot Spencer?”

He stares at this short, stout, scruffy human, who couldn’t physically stand a chance against him but is still brave  _ (stupid? desperate?) _ enough to sit and talk to him. He doesn’t answer.

“My name is Victor Dubenich,” the man awkwardly continues, flustered. “I have a job for you.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“Retrieval of airplane designs,” Dubenich adds hastily. “You’ll be working with a team—”

“I don’t work with teams,” he growls, moving to leave the table.

“Not even for $300,000?” Dubenich offers. “One time deal, you don’t have to see any of them once the job’s done. Please, I’m desperate. If there’s someone better—”

“No,” he says again, and that should have been the end of it. “There’s no one better.”

Wait.

“Then you’ll do it?” the human asks eagerly.

_ (No, I work alone, you can’t pay me enough to work with a team, find someone else.) _

“Sure,” he says, and curses himself to Hell  _ (again). _

He gets a room at the motel anyway, to look over Dubenich’s file before he heads to Chicago. He— _ Eliot, _ he has to get used to that name—flips through the info on Pierson Aviation, on the designs he’s supposed to retrieve, on the people he’s supposed to work with. He’s heard of all of them, even crossed paths with Nathan Ford once or twice, and they’re all the best in their fields. Professionals, even, but they all work alone.

Also, Ford is supposed to be working the other side of the law, but maybe the whole thing with his kid sent him further round the bend than people thought.

Eliot figures he can catch a hour or so of sleep before heading north. He’ll need it, if he’s going to be working with a team again.

He ends up getting half an hour before nightmares of his previous mistakes throw him back to the real world. Washing away the dried sweat takes no time at all, and Eliot decides he might as well start driving if he’s not going to get any rest. He throws the one bag of stuff in the passenger seat of the truck, fiddling with the radio until he finds a station that plays something tolerable. He’s on the highway in minutes, and the town fades into obscurity behind him. Chicago’s only a few hours out, the job’s tonight, and with any luck this whole mess will be over by tomorrow.

* * *

He has terrible luck.

Hardison’s pointing a gun at him, though it’s clear he has no idea how to use it. They’re both here because the money didn’t go through, because the designs somehow never got to Dubenich, even though nothing really went wrong on their end. Eliot refuses to think about how natural it had felt to work with these people, be a part of this team. He’s threatening Hardison more out of annoyance than anything, no real intention of following through, when Ford walks in and defuses the situation.

“You armed?” Ford asks, and Eliot shakes his head.

“I don’t like guns,” he says, and that’s been true his whole life. His body is his weapon, and he’ll use a sword or blunt object if he needs to, but guns make it too easy to kill someone.

Parker clearly knows how to use a gun, though she seems to like them about as much as Eliot does. She reminds him a lot of his sister, actually, and Eliot’s not sure if that’s a good thing.

He’s not even supposed to be here, this is supposed to be a walk-away, and he tells Ford as much. The other man starts laughing, only trailing off when they realise they’ve been set up, that they’ve all been drawn here with Dubenich nowhere in sight.

They follow Nate to a loading bay door, Eliot bringing up the rear just in case. He’s handled a lot worse than whatever Dubenich planned for them, and he’d hate to get this fledgling team killed. Hardison trips and goes down in front of him, barely hitting the floor before Eliot lunges and drags him up, shoving him out of the warehouse seconds before the whole thing explodes. The three of them are sent flying, and Eliot spares a thought to hope Nate made it out before he lets himself be knocked unconscious on the pavement.

* * *

Eliot wakes up before any of them, but not quite soon enough to avoid the cops and paramedics and firefighters swarming the area. Resisting would make more of a scene, so he goes quietly into an ambulance with Nate, who’s still out of it. The other man’s still breathing, though, and the paramedics don’t seem too worried about brain damage or anything, so he just glares at the wall and plans his contingencies.

He lets himself be printed and processed and handcuffed to a chair in Nate’s room once the doctors have checked him over. Parker and Hardison are in the room next door, and from what he can tell they’re both okay. Pissed, but okay.

Nate jerks awake, and Eliot sees the rise of his pulse, the flicker of eyelids, the tightening of muscles; he clearly would rather be in the burning warehouse than the hospital.

_ (The last time Nathan Ford was in a hospital, his son died. He’s probably earned the right to hate them a little.) _

Parker and Hardison explain what happened, how they were taken, how long they have. Eliot can see the gears shift and turn in Nate’s mind, a plan starting to form, and he resigns himself to working with a team again.

“I can take these cops,” Eliot says;  _ I can get us out of here, _ he means, and tries not to roll his eyes when Parker and Hardison start to bicker again.

Nate interrupts, and Eliot puts up one last token protest that the other man brushes away.

“Do you trust me?” Nate asks, and Eliot can feel the shift in the others without having to see them.

“Of course,” he answers for all of them. “You’re an honest man.”

Honesty is flexible, though, and Nate has enough deceit in him to con their way out of the hands of the state police. Eliot growls when Hardison shoves him into the car, but there’s no heat behind it. It scares him that he’s gentled around these people so quickly, but they’ll all go their separate ways soon and there’s a good chance he’ll never see them again.

Hardison leads them to his loft, which isn’t exactly secure but better than nothing. From an aesthetic view, it’s a pretty nice place, too. The geek immediately moves to his computers to print out plane tickets for everyone.

“I’m going to beat Dubenich so bad that even the people who look like him are gonna bleed,” Eliot growls, drawing a scoff from Parker.

“You won’t get within a hundred yards,” she says dismissively. “He knows your face. He knows all our faces.”

He stares at the way she just shrugs off attempted murder, shakes his head incredulously. “He tried to  _ kill us,” _ he spells it out, just in case she skipped over that little detail.

“More importantly, he didn’t pay us,” Parker corrects blithely.

_ “How is that more important?” _ he sputters; despite how much Parker reminds him of them at times, this kind of attitude is nothing he’d expect from any of his family, and he’s a little relieved. If Dubenich had pulled this shit with his siblings, they would have turned around and bombed him right back, and Eliot isn’t sure he wants to see Parker’s version of payback.

“I take that personally,” Parker tells him.

“There’s something wrong with you,” Eliot says back, and he’s only half-joking.

It turns out Dubenich was lying about the designs even belonging to him, and that’s the cherry on top of this shit pile. He snaps at Nate for not seeing this coming, but Eliot carries just as much of the blame: he’s a hitter, he knows how situations like these usually go down, and he ignored all the signs because he was so focused on his new team.

“You’re running,” Nate says, and Eliot wants to laugh because he’s been running for centuries, and there’s not a lot in the universe that will make him stand still.

“You got a better idea?” he asks, and it turns out Nate does. Eliot shouldn’t be so surprised that Nate takes to cons so well, but he is surprised at how well the other man has managed to read them well enough to know their motivations for doing this job.

He really wants to kill Dubenich for the way he manipulated Nate, and he might still get around to it; using someone’s dead son to get them to commit a crime? Yeah, Dubenich is a dead man walking. Nate is turning out to be someone Eliot might be comfortable following, even if he is ridiculously cryptic.

“What the hell’s a Sophie?” he calls after them, isn’t really surprised when he doesn’t get an answer. It comes soon enough anyway, and it’s almost physically painful to sit through the butchering of Macbeth. Eliot can practically see the hearts in Nate’s eyes, and maybe there was brain damage from the explosion after all.

Standing in the alley, Eliot tries half-heartedly to dissuade Nate, resigning himself to yet another team member who might get them all killed and/or arrested. He watches the play between them, thinks there’s more than one kind of history that could cause trouble if they’re not careful. He almost snorts at Nate’s insistence of “just one more time,” considering he’s been telling himself the same thing for days now.

He makes popcorn while the others get comfortable and Hardison sets up his presentation of the mark. Listening with half an ear, Eliot makes his way between them, kicking Hardison and Parker’s propped-up feet as he passes. He answers Nate’s question automatically, surprised when Sophie actually knows the town he’s talking about.

“I know when you sent Dubenich his designs you weren’t supposed to make any copies,” Nate says pointedly to Hardison.

The geek puts a hand to his chest in mock-affront. “No, I promise. That would be very wrong.” Eliot damn near chokes on his popcorn at the level of sincerity in Hardison’s voice.

“Show me your copies,” Nate orders dryly, and Hardison grins and does.

“It’s an airplane,” Eliot points out the obvious, because he knows nothing about planes.  _ (Why would he, when all he needs to fly are his own two wings?) _ Nate, apparently, does know a little about planes, and Eliot’s gratified that he’s not the only one surprised at the honest man’s hidden depths.

Nate zeroes in on the rival, mind already jumping three, four, a dozen steps ahead. Sophie’s got this knowing look on her face, and not a little bit of lust, although she’s doing a good job of hiding it. 

“I’m thinking Nigerians,” Nate muses. “Yeah. Nigerians will do nicely.” He walks away, lost in his plans. Eliot looks at Sophie, hoping this is normal behavior for Nate and not the insane ramblings of a broken, drunken man.

“Well, he hasn’t changed a bit,” she offers, and Eliot resigns himself to being surrounded by annoyingly cryptic people  _ all the fucking time. _

The con is ridiculously complicated, and insane, and Eliot has no idea how Nate thinks this will actually work. Dubenich managed to work out a double-cross after a meticulously researched operation; there’s no way he won’t see this coming. Sophie calls the Nigerians, who agree to meet with them, and if the timing on all this is even a few seconds off, the entire con will fall apart.

Amazingly, it doesn’t. Eliot plays the nerdy IT guy  _ (he has no intention of letting Hardison know he’s dabbled in computers before), _ struggles to keep a straight face at the geek’s indignant sputtering when he butchers Klingon and flirts with the secretary. They’re all trying to figure out where they fit in with each other, what everyone’s capable of, and Eliot watches Nate hold himself apart even as he obviously  _ wants _ to join in, to actually let himself enjoy this. He doesn’t for the same reason he drinks: he doesn’t think he’s allowed to have anything good after what happened to his son.

Sophie carries most of the weight on this con, not that Eliot’s complaining. He would have liked to hit Dubenich at least once, but Nate might be onto something with the whole “destroying the mark’s mental health” deal. The other man takes an absurd amount of glee at taunting Dubenich after his company’s stock tanks and the FBI finds enough evidence to arrest him. Eliot really, really hopes Nate never meets his sister.

The team isn’t quite seamless yet, but they’re in sync and already comfortable enough to banter with each other. They can all feel the reluctance, how nobody wants to leave because the potential is addicting. Even the money they made off of this job isn’t quite as exciting as it used to be  _ (not that it was about the money for him, but Parker cares more about money than just about anything else, and even she’s interested in sticking around and seeing where this goes), _ and Eliot is lying through his teeth when he reminds them it was a one-time deal.

Of course, he barely gets on a branching path before turning to watch the others leave. He grins when he sees Hardison accosting Nate, starts making his way over when Parker joins them. Sophie is sitting on a bench ahead of them, and Eliot just needs to say his piece.

He needs to remind Nate that there are people who care, who  _ could  _ care if they were given time and chance, people who could be friends. They’re all a little broken, but Eliot thinks that all their jagged edges might just fit together.  
  



End file.
